


Cabin Fever

by sanguinity



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-30
Updated: 2015-03-30
Packaged: 2018-03-20 10:59:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3647829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is perfectly fine with being snowed in; it is Joan who is unraveling at the seams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cabin Fever

**Author's Note:**

  * For [time_converges](https://archiveofourown.org/users/time_converges/gifts).



> orig at [tumblr](http://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/115057584278/fic-cabin-fever)

Three days in, when Joan could no longer remember what not being snowed in felt like, Marcus emailed her some files for a second opinion. Joan flicked through them, then sent a quick reply to Marcus:  _Thanks, you’re a lifesaver!_

Laptop tucked safely under her coat, she bullied her way through the drift blocking her door. She and Sherlock had been trying to keep an open path to her basement, but a blanket of undifferentiated white had again obscured the individual steps. She missed her footing twice on the invisible stairs, but she managed to gain the front door with the laptop still dry and herself largely undamaged.

“Sherlock!” she called as she let herself in. _“Sherlock!_  Marcus sent us a case!”

She heard running footsteps from the back of the brownstone and then Sherlock swung into view, meeting her at the inner door, where she was shucking off her boots. “Excellent!” he beamed. He helped with her coat, then gestured her into the library, where there was a fire laid. “Just one moment,” he told her, and ran for his own laptop.

She popped the lid on her machine, hoping for something big. Something that would justify getting out of the brownstone, commandeering another snowplow, making their way through the white to literally anywhere else at all,  _something_.

Unfortunately, the case proved underwhelming. Oh, she had no doubt it was important enough to its principals, but it was also straightforward and largely complete. Try as Joan might, she could find no hidden plot within it, no obscure motivations, no subtle scheme that would require their urgent and personal attention.

That didn’t stop her from making the attempt, however.

“Watson, you’re grasping at phantasms,” Sherlock chided her. “We don’t need to ascribe abstruse and nefarious motivations to the dog; simple separation anxiety accounts for its actions. Everything here is entirely consistent with the most plebian reading of events. In fact, it passes my comprehension why Bell wanted a second opinion on this.”

Joan’s phone chimed, and she snatched it up, holding on to one last hope that Marcus had held back some final piece evidence, the inexplicable detail that would refuse to align neatly with the rest, the singular fact that would make this case worth their while.

_No prob. I’m sure he’s a terror on days like this. ;-)_

She stared at the winky, her hope bleeding out of her: Marcus had sent them busywork. Busywork for Joan to palm off on Sherlock. Because he imagined that  _Sherlock_ was the one who was climbing the walls.

“Right,” she said to Sherlock, her eyes on the screen, hoping something else would appear if she stared at it long enough. She flicked her thumb across the letters, hoping for some missed additional message or attachment, but the image just bounced tauntingly at her. She grimaced. “I suppose I should get out of your hair, then.” She got up to gather her things.

“Would you like a cup of cocoa before you go?” Sherlock asked.

She shook her head. It had been three days, and she had had her fill of cocoa. She went to the stairs and sat on the second step to draw on her boots.

“S’mores?” he asked hopefully.

She had had her fill of s’mores, too. She stood. “No, I’ll just… I’ve got some reading to get back to.” She reached for her coat.

He leapt to reach it first, then shifted in indecision, his coat-holding manners too deeply ingrained in him to play keep-away with it, but clearly not wanting to facilitate her departure, either. “You could bring your reading up here? The fire is quite cozy, and I promise to not disturb you. I have plenty to keep myself occupied with upstairs.”

And that was it, right there. The three days of forced confinement had Joan chafing with frustration, but Sherlock was as happily occupied as he had been before the storm warnings had begun.

 _Only boring people get bored,_  her dad used to say to her. Sherlock, of course —  _of course_  — was anything but boring, right down to his very bones. It didn’t matter that they had been trapped in here for days: he was rustling and banging and muttering to himself and shouting  _eureka_ in five corners of the brownstone at once. Whereas Joan could not bring herself to do anything more than stare at the snow filling her window wells. She had always hated that saying of her father’s: she had never, ever been able to prove herself  _not-boring_. She organized a busy, chaotic, novelty-generating life for herself — medical school, surgery, addicts, crime — but when those mechanisms ran down and she had nothing to fall back on but herself, the truth always pressed to the fore:  _boring_.

She held out her arm for her coat. “No,” she told him, as he settled it around her shoulders, “I’m fine downstairs.”

Back downstairs, she gathered her book and blanket and settled in near the windows that opened onto the garden — or would have opened onto the garden, had the garden and window wells not both been full of snow — to attempt reading again. As before, the attempt devolved into blankly contemplating the fine pattern of air pockets and snow crystals in the white stuff pressing up against the glass. The blanket around her shoulders slowed the chill that bled from the window, but couldn’t fully prevent it from creeping through her. The book lay untouched in her lap.

At some point, she vaguely thought she should make some tea to warm her fingers, but the thought did not have enough urgency behind it to compel her into motion.

The door at the front of her basement banged open, and Joan turned to look.

“Don’t mind me, Watson, I won’t disturb you,” Sherlock said, gesturing at his glassed-in space beside the door, full of plants and UV lights. “I just have a—” His movement wound down as he peered at her in the half-light. He frowned. “—a  _thing_ ,” he finished, his motion abruptly restarting again. “I’ll just.” His arm windmilled, apparently indicating the urgent  _thingness_ of his  _thing_.

Joan nodded her consent at him, not sure what reaction he was looking for, and he stepped into his makeshift grow-room. The orchids from the AgriNex case were in there, she wasn’t sure what else. She dropped her gaze to her book and tried to remember where she had been on the page. Nothing looked familiar, and so she turned a few pages back, trying to find the place where she had stopped paying attention.

“No, I’m sorry, Watson. I hate to disturb you, but I really must insist,” Sherlock said, startling from her reverie again. He had emerged from his grow-room. “This next stage is critical and very delicate. I have reasonably steady hands, but this  _absolutely_ requires a surgeon’s touch.”

Joan blinked at him slowly, as her brain came back from wherever it had been: not on the book, apparently, because this page was no more familiar to her than the other. “I…” she said. She glanced at the grow-room, the repository of his mysteriously critical and delicate project, and back at Sherlock again. His entire body was leaning toward her, eagerly anticipating a response.

“Of course,” she said, shutting her book. “Show me what you need done.”

“Excellent,” he beamed, standing aside for her. “And as soon as we finish here, I have another project upstairs which requires your urgent assistance.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Driven to Distraction (The Thingness of the Thing Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12053322) by [amindamazed (hophophop)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hophophop/pseuds/amindamazed)




End file.
